Having a good mail filtering system is essential, especially if you have a very active Inbox: going through hundreds of emails can be quite time consuming. ifile is a Bayesian mail filter that can learn how to organize your messages, taking into account the way in which you tend to organize them.

ifile is no longer under active development but it will prove to be very useful if you want to filter your emails using different criteria, not just spam or non spam.

ifile must be installed via the Terminal.app by using a suite of commands: “./configure”; “make install” or “gmake install”. To view the configure script options you can run the “./configure --help” command. For more details, you can read the INSTALL file included in the archive.

ifile can be used with different email clients: Emacs/ Gnus, Procmail, Pine, Slocal/.maildelivery, MH/NMH and EXMH. You can find details about how to integrate ifile with each email client on the developer’s website HERE.

Once ifile is installed you need to train him before successfully using its capabilities. You can can learn how to build your ifile database and start filtering your messages HERE.

ifile will gradually learn how to classify and organize your emails. Keep in mind that it does not require you to set up a set of rules. ifile will monitor how you organize your messages and adjusts its algorithm when you move incorrectly filtered emails.

If you want to clean and remove the ifile configuration data you can run the following commands in the Terminal.app: “ make clean”, “rm -f config.cache config.log config.status Makefile”.

ifile is a great tool if you need to sort a large number of emails and organize them by category. ifile will not only place your messages into different categories: even the spam emails can be filtered by type to gain a higher level of accuracy.